Ambassadors for Christ

Have you ever had the experience of feeling that God has guided you only for everything to seemingly go wrong? If you have been, this article from the pen of a missionary of the 1930s, Mildred Cable, might help.

‘It was well that it was in thine heart’.

‘We have carefully considered your case and have very regretfully reached the conclusion that we cannot accept you for foreign service.’

The Secretary of the Missionary Society was exceedingly kind and tried to say helpful things, but it was a heavy blow and it shattered a whole edifice of hopes. For the second time this recruit had been rejected by a Mission Board.

He had felt so sure that he was right in offering himself, and every circumstance had seemed to justify him in going forward. He knew himself medically fit and felt confident that his references had been satisfactory. In fact no definite objection had been raised, and when he applied he was accepted for training and had spent one year in the Society’s Training College.

During that period he had done his best to measure up, but the whole time he had been uncomfortably conscious that the atmosphere was not wholly congenial to him and that he was not fitting in happily with the other students. Nothing serious, but he realised quite well that, temperamentally, he was not an easy man to get on with.

He always envied others for their capacity for facile intercourse, but all his life he had been shy, self-conscious and awkward Ð ‘dour’, his Scotch associates called him. He had never made a friend, but in the office, though he was not popular and though he went his own way leaving others to go theirs, no friction ever occurred.

In church life he was valued and gave many hours each week to assist the minister with accounts and with the business side of the work. He never undertook to give help in special evangelistic efforts, for his gifts did not lie that way.

When the Missionary Society in which he was interested and to which he subscribed, issued an urgent appeal for volunteers, he took it very seriously and this offer of service had been his response. It was not an easy step to take, but he braced himself to it. He never could take things lightly, and if the need were as great as they said, he must volunteer whatever it meant, and it meant a great deal.

Turned down

The Board of the first Society to which he applied, told him that they did not happen to require a man with business training just then, and that he had not the necessary qualifications for other posts. So that was that.

Having gone so far he could not drop the matter, because it was not in his nature to start on a venture and fail to carry it through. Three months later he made another application, this time to a Society of a different order. He realised this when he saw the papers, for the leading questions were all drafted in view of drawing out information regarding the candidate’s spiritual history.

He knew that his answers sounded a little dry, but he had no thrilling experiences to tell and nothing would induce him to colour them up for the sake of gaining approbation. As for leading men to Christ, well, he had his own way of doing this and it did not look impressive, when he put it down in black and white.

This time he was accepted on probation. For a whole year he had done his best to fit in, though he always felt like a square peg in a round hole. Now he must take the refusal as final and go back to office work, and to his old duties at the Church. He knew he was a lucky man to have a job waiting for him and it was a great consolation, at this painful hour, to realise that the man who knew him best wanted him back.

Was I really called?

He was ever a thinker and a ponderer of problems. During the months that followed he could never rid his mind of the question: ‘Was I really called by God, or did I follow a will o’ the wisp, sent out to lead me astray?’ He could not see his way through it; all he knew was that he had made the only move possible to an honourable Christian man who hears of a great need which it is perhaps in his power to meet. The whole experience left him neither bitter nor resentful, but profoundly puzzled.

He meditated: ‘If I were dealing with anyone who had good intentions and only desired to do the right thing, I should see to it that he knew what the right thing was, and what I wanted him to do. I would not let him flounder, nor would I let him make a mistake. If it were at the office, my orders to him would be quite clear and definite. Have we not the right to expect divine guidance to be equally straightforward?’

Illumination

He continued for a long time in this puzzled mood but in the end illumination came, and this is the way in which it came.

There was a change of personnel at the office and it brought promotion for him. His new position made a quite different demand on his powers. So far his had been routine work but now he was admitted to the council where plans, projects and ventures were discussed. He saw how he had hitherto worked in a small, water-tight compartment where he had been little more than an efficient machine. The action and reaction of that department was fixed and there was no room for uncertainty or for venture.

Now all was different and every day surprising things happened; allowance had always to be made for the unexpected. The new life was one of endeavour, speculation and adventure. He was suddenly transferred from the position of a man in a restricted sphere, who works for the thing visible and tangible, to another plane altogether. Any instructions which now reached him came in quite different terms. It used to be, ‘Do this’, and he did it; but now he was entrusted with the knowledge of aims, purposes and objectives, but was not always told in detail how to attain them.

Something clicked

One day while pondering his old problem of guidance, something clicked in his mind, and in a flash he saw that it was not incompatible with the final purpose of his life that he should have been led to offer for foreign service and have been rejected. Indeed it might well be a mere incident relative to far wider issues.

Here in this business house, the inexperienced clerk was occupied with the detail of the immediate and was not concerned with broader purposes. As promotion came, however, his horizons were widened and he instinctively looked to the end on which all the detail work was focussed.

With this in mind he read with new illumination of Abraham, obeying God to the point of binding his son on the altar, and then being stopped by the Voice; of Moses, brought within sight of the Promised Land and then refused admittance; of Job, exalted to an eminence, then cast down to a dung-hill; of David, commended for wishing to build a house for God and encouraged by the prophet to do so, then stopped in his purpose. Perhaps this word which God spoke to David was the key to the perplexing problem: ‘It was well that it was in thine heart.’

He saw it now. Men who were to handle things of spiritual import, who were to reckon with the unseen, had lessons to learn in a school where every detail was not immediately made plain. It was for them to be so confident of the Guide and so certain of his leading that there could be no clamouring for explanations.

On the altar

In view of the special service to which he was later called, he recognised, in the incident of his two offers to the Missionary Societies, and their refusal of his help, a sure and certain sign to himself and to others that everything had been laid upon the altar. By doing so he had gained freedom, for his obedience was established both to himself and to his friends. He had withheld nothing that was asked of him.

He now knew that the service required of him was to be Christ’s witness in one of England’s great industrial centres. A glorious calling! He sometimes wondered if any man on the foreign mission field had such scope as he, and he rejoiced increasingly in the commission entrusted to him.

He recalled the effect of the appeal issued by the Missionary Society and so emphasised by the deputation. It made a volunteer of him. The claims of his own country were no less insistent. How was it that no voice of equal authority presented them? What of the Christian man’s commission to be a voice for God in Parliament, to raise his standard in the law courts, to magnify him in a scholastic career, to stand for rectitude in business and for purity in journalism? What of the need to occupy every available post in prisons, reformatories and hospitals and fill them with men and women whose first business was witness and who had no reservations in the wholeheartedness of their service?

He had attended so many missionary meetings and heard so many appeals but they were always for the foreign field, and he observed that directly a young man showed special keenness in things spiritual it was assumed that he must become a foreign missionary. He could not remember hearing one definite appeal from the pulpit urging the young to prepare themselves to capture pivotal posts in their own land with the definite view of holding them for Christ.

What was the matter? Did the Church not covet these strategic appointments sufficiently to make an effort to secure them? If the children of light were so apathetic, the children of darkness were not.

The field was the world, and he held his business appointment in it under as direct a commission from the Lord of the harvest as any missionary pioneer of distant lands.

An extract from Ambassadors for Christ by Mildred Cable & Francesca French (1935), published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Ambassadors for Christ

Strange guidance - Mildred Cable's word for the perplexed

Turned down

Was I really called?

Illumination

Something clicked

On the altar

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